People & Histories
c. 2600–1900 BCE (mature phase)

The Indus Valley Civilisation

One of the world's first urban civilisations builds planned brick cities such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa along the Indus and its neighbouring rivers.

  • The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective — Gregory L. Possehl, AltaMira Press (2002)
  • Indus civilization — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 — Romila Thapar, Allen Lane / University of California Press (2002)
  • The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia — Vagheesh M. Narasimhan et al., Science 365 (6457) (2019)
  • The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate — Edwin Bryant, Oxford University Press (2001)
  • Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization — Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Oxford University Press (1998)
  • Archaeological Ruins at Moenjodaro — UNESCO World Heritage Centre
  • Pakistan — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • The Idea of Pakistan — Stephen P. Cohen, Brookings Institution Press (2004)

Well established civilisationidentityheritageculture

Part of the story of India and Pakistan.

Farming villages appeared on the edge of the Indus plains long before any city: at Mehrgarh in Balochistan, people were growing wheat and barley and herding animals by around 7000 BCE.

  • Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization — Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Oxford University Press (1998)
  • Pakistan — Encyclopaedia Britannica
In the 1920s archaeologists digging at Harappa in Punjab and Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, both now in Pakistan, uncovered the great cities these communities eventually built. At its height, around 2600–1900 BCE, this civilisation stretched over a region larger than Egypt or Mesopotamia, from Baluchistan to Gujarat and the edge of the Ganges plain, with more than a thousand known settlements, including Dholavira and Lothal in today’s India.
  • The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective — Gregory L. Possehl, AltaMira Press (2002)
  • Indus civilization — Encyclopaedia Britannica

The cities were laid out in grids, with baked-brick houses, wells, covered drains, granaries, and at Mohenjo-daro a large “Great Bath”. Weights and bricks followed standard sizes across hundreds of kilometres. Traders exchanged beads, cotton and seals with Mesopotamia. Yet there are no obvious palaces, royal tombs or great temples, leaving much speculation about how these cities were governed, and the short inscriptions on their seals have never been deciphered.

  • The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective — Gregory L. Possehl, AltaMira Press (2002)
  • Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 — Romila Thapar, Allen Lane / University of California Press (2002)
  • Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization — Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Oxford University Press (1998)

From about 1900 BCE the cities declined, probably due to climate change, shifting rivers and the collapse of trade rather than the invasion once imagined, and people moved to smaller villages further east. Some practices, such as certain ornaments, farming methods and perhaps forms of worship, may have carried on into later Indian life.

  • The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective — Gregory L. Possehl, AltaMira Press (2002)
  • Indus civilization — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization — Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, Oxford University Press (1998)
Mohenjo-daro became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980, but its brick is now threatened by salt and groundwater.

The same region later hosted Gandhara, whose Buddhist art and the university city of Taxila flourished for centuries. Many Pakistanis take quiet pride in this layered past, Indus, Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim, even if school textbooks have often begun the national story with the arrival of Islam.

  • Pakistan — Encyclopaedia Britannica
  • The Idea of Pakistan — Stephen P. Cohen, Brookings Institution Press (2004)

How it's seen
Most archaeologists and geneticists

The Harappans were a distinct urban culture, probably not speakers of Sanskrit. Their cities declined by about 1900 BCE, before the Vedic hymns were composed, and ancient DNA suggests that steppe-related ancestry, plausibly linked to Indo-European speakers, arrived in the second millennium BCE.

  • The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective — Gregory L. Possehl, AltaMira Press (2002)
  • The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia — Vagheesh M. Narasimhan et al., Science 365 (6457) (2019)
  • The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate — Edwin Bryant, Oxford University Press (2001)

Indigenist view

Some Indian writers, many close to Hindu nationalism, identify the Harappans with the Vedic people and argue that Indian civilisation developed in place without any significant migration from outside.

  • The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate — Edwin Bryant, Oxford University Press (2001)

Why it matters today

India

The Indus cities give Indians a civilisation as old as Egypt and Mesopotamia, and a source of deep pride. Who the Harappans were, what language they spoke and how they relate to the Vedic people is hotly debated, because it bears on the question of who is "indigenous" to India.

Pakistan

Pakistanis point to Mohenjo-daro and Harappa as proof that their land was a cradle of civilisation long before 1947, a heritage that belongs to Sindh and Punjab rather than to India alone. The "Priest-King" and the "Dancing Girl" figures are national icons, and the Indus River is still the country's lifeline.